Worked on your floor at the office. Pretty nondescript --
pleasant fellow, smiled a lot, didn't make a lot of waves.
Bosses seemed to like him.

He just sort of went away one Friday. He was there on a
Friday afternoon, and gone from your department by
Monday morning. But he hadn't been fired, and he hadn't
quit. You heard he had "gone upstairs" to "work on some
special projects." Every three or four months you might
run into him briefly in the lobby -- still smiling, still waving
a friendly hello, looking a little older. He's still with the
company -- you just don't see him much.

You know the guy.

No matter where in the country you work, you know him.

I think I've finally figured out who he is.

The other day, I went into a bookstore to buy a videotape
of a movie (that's what they sell in bookstores these days
-- movies and coffee, with the occasional muffin), and it
took me about 30 seconds to realize something was
amiss.

"Uh, where's the tapes?" I inquired.

"Don't carry them anymore," the salesperson said. "The
whole chain has switched over to DVDs only."

Apparently this is an industrywide development --
Americans, after decades of being trained like puppies
to fetch videotapes of movies and push them into VCRs,
are being informed that the tapes (and eventually the
VCRs) are obsolete. DVDs and DVD players are the
designated replacements. For now.

I say "for now" because of that guy in your office -- the
one who was sent upstairs to work on those special
projects.

You may be thinking that DVDs are taking over because
of their technological superiority. Nope. The DVDs are
taking over because of that guy who was sent upstairs.

The guy who was sent upstairs represents the most
nefarious aspect of American business. He represents
something more ominous than the executives who ran
Enron and WorldCom, more chilling than the
accountants who reinvented math and thus sank the
stock market.

The guy who was summoned upstairs was sent to the
office that every major company has -- the office no one
ever talks about. This is the office devoted to making
current products outmoded and useless even as they
are being heavily marketed to customers.

You don't think it's true? You don't think the big corporations have entire divisions that
are working at cross-purposes with the departments that manufacture and sell the
company's current products to us? We live in an era in which raw materials exist that,
theoretically, could make any product last forever -- an era in which brilliant engineers
are capable of creating devices that will work wonderfully until the end of time.

But if they were allowed to do that, the companies would go out of business. If you
build something too efficiently, and market it too well, the money will stop coming in.
The customers will be so satisfied that they will have no need to come back.

Thus, the guy upstairs. He and his colleagues in that secret department are working
just as hard as you, but with a crucial difference. You are putting out today's product,
foolishly assuming this is the business your company is in. While your company is
really in the business of figuring out ways to tell the customers in a few years: You're
going to have to throw away what we sold you before.

"Research and development"? That's a nice way to put it, but it's a euphemism.
"Planned obsolescence?" That comes closer -- it's what the auto manufacturers have
been doing for a century: building their cars knowing that the cars will be made to feel
obsolete within a few years.

The VCR-to-DVD is just one example. The people who manufacture video games
have perfected this -- even as one generation of vacant-eyed young men stare at a
screen, new machines are being invented so that those young men, and the next
generation, will feel they have to purchase new control boxes if they want any fun in
their lives. Cameras, toasters . . . look at the music business. Music is music -- yet the
Beach Boys alone have become millionaires many times over because of the guys
upstairs in the secret room. From vinyl 45s to the first generation of LPs, on to
eight-track tapes and then to cassettes, from CDs to those tiny new computer-fed
music players to whatever the boys upstairs are cooking up right now, the Beach Boys
have been able to sell "Surfer Girl" and "409" hundreds of different ways, because the
guys upstairs keep making the old music-playing machines yesterday's news and
today's garbage.

It's the engine that drives American business -- the engine run by all the smiling guys
who used to work on your floor. They're up there right now, behind triple locks, making
sure that whatever it is you're toiling away at manufacturing for the company, it will
become useless within three or four years. They have the safest jobs in the building --
the only jobs that will never go out of style.